Free My Everything by Julia Barrett Page A

broken off. He was certain they’d been used on the safe. He was surprised the police and the feds hadn’t noticed. He turned them over in his hands. Ben doubted there were fingerprints aside from his on either. According to the police report he read, no prints had been found anywhere in the apartment. He pulled out a plastic bag anyway.
    As Ben dropped the screwdriver and the penknife into the bag, the white edge of a torn piece of paper caught his eye. It was wedged along the inside front facing of the drawer. He peeled it carefully away from the wall of the drawer. Holding the paper gingerly by the edges, he turned it over.
    Ben blinked a couple times to make certain he was seeing correctly. It was the same photo he’d just stuck in his jacket pocket. The same wallet-sized wedding photo, except this one had been torn in half. Julie’s half was missing. He was alone in the photo wearing a dark sport coat, the arm that would have reached for Julie’s hand had been torn off, leaving a ragged edge.
    Trying to clear his head, Ben sat perfectly still. Someone else had sat right here on the edge of the bed, looked in the drawer, grabbed the screwdriver and the penknife, scraped the hell out of the safe and dropped this photo. Ben pulled the other picture out of his jacket pocket and compared the two. They were identical.
    Ben suddenly realized he’d neglected to ask Mrs. Muir what photo she’d been shown. He’d been so focused on what the man looked like that it didn’t even occur to him to wonder where someone had gotten a photo of him.
    That fact pointed out to him just how much he’d forgotten. He needed to get his ass in gear for his sister’s sake.
    Carrying the photograph as if it were made of hand-blown glass, Ben strode into the kitchen and searched the drawers for another plastic bag. He found a sandwich-sized Baggie, dropped the picture inside and sealed it. Ben was willing to bet good money he would find at least one fingerprint on the photo.
    He’d show Mrs. Muir his wedding photo and see if this was the picture she was shown.
    He knew for damn sure that he hadn’t torn that photo in half and left it in the drawer. This was not the work of Jawar’s men. This was something entirely different. These actions screamed personal vendetta.
    How the hell did someone get a copy of this photograph? There were very few in existence. He had the copy in his pocket. Julie had carried one in her purse, the purse that had burned along with everything else in the car in Indonesia. Tom and Mallory kept a copy. Julie’s parents had several copies. His mother had a couple. That was it. And he hadn’t made any large prints, just wallets from pictures taken with Tom’s digital camera. Ben had printed them up himself on his computer and he’d made sure to wipe that computer’s hard drive before he left the country. The only existing copy of the photo disk was locked in his workroom at the house in Costa Rica.
    What in the hell was going on? Ben was no longer concerned about an insider at Aris. The cold-blooded murder of two of his co-workers was intended to get his attention.
    What a tragic, indifferent waste of human life. That was what haunted him about Julie’s death, the coldness of the men who murdered her. That’s why he left it all behind in the first place. Ben believed himself guilty of the same indifference, regardless of the reason, no matter how justified he felt. He left because he was becoming too much like Julie’s murderers.
    Ben pulled out his cell and put in a call to Tom on the secure line. It was time to bring him up to speed.

My Everything◊J. R. Barrett
     
 
     
 
    By the time Grace reached her car it was after eleven. The dinner and panel discussion had gone overtime. Despite the challenging questions, she found herself very distracted by thoughts of Ben. Visions of their morning together kept popping into her consciousness. A few times, she caught herself about to laugh out loud despite the